I am organizing a seminar to take place in the fall at my law school on “global tectonics.” The theme will be the application of law to the problems created by what I call global tectonics. I intend to consider problems like the Ukraine, Boko Haram, Mexican drug violence and more. Students will be reading the globalization and rule of law literature and then examining these trouble spots where global social, political and economic tectonic plates are clashing. They will be asked to consider how or whether legal solutions to these situations are feasible. If you have any ideas for papers or other material for the seminar or would like to present work of your own please let me know. My campus email address is sdiamond@scu.edu.

Today’s Financial Times has a front page story on the newest stage of the Russian crisis. Putin’s Russia is being hit by both western sanctions as a result of its invasion of its sovereign neighbor, Ukraine, as well as by a glut in the supply of global oil.

This chart indicates the significant downward move in oil prices:

As a result, the world market is marking down the value of the Russian economy and hence the ruble is tanking in value.

In response, Putin is now forced to pump large amounts of cash into the banking system to keep key financial institutions afloat. The latest infusion amounts to close to $8 billion for three major banks. While the regime is claiming the ruble crisis is over, the FT story includes the following: “This is only the beginning,” said a senior executive at a large Russian financial institution. “Everyone is bracing for what comes after new year.”

Indeed the news about the bank infusion sent the ruble down again Friday after a rally earlier in the week. The overall damage of recent months is clear in the chart below:

Meanwhile in a recent speech Putin continued to make noise about diversifying the Russian economy which is another way of admitting that a quarter century of post-Cold War political and economic development has largely been a waste for the majority of Russians (and for much of the former eastern bloc as a whole it might as well be said, Ukraine first and foremost).

Thus, the Cold War may be over but we are far from resolving the fundamental imbalances in the global economy. These have now become so severe that countries like China and Russia are increasingly willing to confront the West with provocative actions like the Ukraine invasion and the assertion of Chinese sovereignty in the south China sea area.

It is understandable that we sympathize with the victims of this kind of aggression but pushing counties like Ukraine to choose Nato membership over genuine autonomy, which has been US policy for years, only stokes the tensions with Russia and provides Putin with political capital that he uses to shore up his own domestic position. Sanctions, too, are a dual edged sword. It is true that Russia needs the world economy but authoritarian forms of capitalism have been very stable over time. As the crisis deepens inside Russia it is just as possible that it will lead to greater centralization of power by Putin and his military and bureaucracy.

In a clear affirmation of the longstanding right of women and girls in California to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, the Director of California’s Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) this week rejected a multi-year effort by the administrations of two California universities affiliated with the Catholic Church to limit coverage of abortions in their employee health care plans.

California has long led the nation in the protection of a woman’s right to effective reproductive health care. Since the early 1970’s case law, statutes and the state Constitution itself have made it clear that under California law all women and girls possess a right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. Thus, the California Constitution enshrines an express right to privacy as a result of an amendment that followed court cases recognizing a woman’s right to choose. This was followed more recently (2002) by the Reproductive Privacy Act (RPA) which guarantees a woman’s right to both terminate a pregnancy and to birth control.

These fundamental rights to reproductive health care are reinforced by statutes that require state regulated health care plans including insurance plans and HMOs to provide coverage for safe and effective means to terminate a pregnancy once a woman or girl has exercised her right to choose that outcome.

There is only one category of abortion that an HMO or insurance provider would not be required to cover: an abortion that is illegal under the California Reproductive Privacy Act (termination of a pregnancy of a viable fetus is illegal under the RPA).

(One aspect of the law that confuses many is the question of what is a non-medically necessary abortion. Some anti-abortion advocates characterize such an abortion as “elective.” In fact, there is no category called “elective” abortion under California law unless one is referring to the right of a woman to “choose” to have an abortion (for whatever reason) in the sense that she may elect to have an abortion. A 1967 California statute called the Therapeutic Abortion Act attempted to create a distinction between abortions needed to protect the life of the mother and other abortions. At the time this was an advance from an era where all abortion was illegal. But the California Supreme Court struck down that attempt to create different classes of abortions In People v. Barksdale (1972) as “impermissibly vague.” The effect was to recognize abortions generally as legal in California prior to the US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. The TAA remained on the books, however, until expressly repealed by the RPA when it went into effect in 2003.

(The choice to have an abortion is, thus, separate from what kinds of medical or surgical methods are safe and effective to carry out that choice. Any such safe and effective method is considered “medically necessary” under the Knox-Keene Act and therefore will be part of providing a basic medical service that must be covered by a plan licensed under the Act by the DMHC, as the letters to the major insurers from the DMHC make clear. A non-medically necessary abortion is an oxymoron. Confusion may exist because some insurers explain to their beneficiaries that a request to use a drug like RU-486 for treatment of a medical condition other than pregnancy is considered “experimental” and therefore not “medically necessary.”)

Despite this clear Constitutional and statutory framework, in place since the mid-1970’s, certain entities affiliated with the Catholic Church have attempted to put in place new categories or distinctions that would carve out certain abortions from those that are protected under California law.

A few years after a resounding legal defeat at the California Supreme Court in 2004 (in an attempt to overturn the Women’s Contraception Equity Act), the Catholic Church apparently used its influence at Loyola Marymount University to get the University and its insurers to engineer in secret approval by the DMHC of an HMO product that would have prevented coverage of what Anthem called “elective” abortions as well as a wide variety of birth control methods. This restriction was approved in a hidden administrative process inside the DMHC, which has regulatory authority over the HMO industry in California, during the Schwarzenegger governorship. For more detail on that effort see my earlier post here.

DMHC records obtained through a Public Records Act request suggest that that 2008 decision was made on the basis of a relatively thin legal analysis with no reference to the Constitution or the RPA. In any case, Anthem did not in fact sell any HMO product based on that 2008 interpretation by the DMHC. Only in 2013 did Loyola Marymount University and Santa Clara University, both Jesuit affiliated schools, announce their intent to buy health care plans from Kaiser and Anthem that would exclude some abortion coverage.

Their announcement of this intention included new categorizations of abortions called “medically necessary” and “elective.” The new plans would have eliminated whatever was considered an “elective” as opposed to a “medically necessary” abortion. As explained above, the concept of an “elective” abortion does not exist in California law. Tellingly, neither the Universities nor the insurers ever definitively explained what kinds of abortions these new categories would include and provided no legal basis for these distinctions. At one point, Santa Clara University proposed language that mirrored that of the Hyde Amendment, attempting to define any abortion that was undertaken for anything other than to save the life of the mother as “elective.” Again, there was no basis for this kind of discriminatory language in California law, as the DMHC has now unambiguously agreed.

Faculty at Santa Clara University objected to this effort by the University Administration and its Trustees and, with the strong support of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), convened a special session of its Faculty Senate, apparently for the first time in the 150 year history of the school, to affirm its objections to the University’s new policy effort. Specifically, faculty objected to the failure of the University to abide by its commitment to shared governance in attempting the policy change. A campus wide vote of the faculty overwhelmingly approved this objection.

Several faculty demanded that the University define these new categories so that employees could understand the implications for their health care and to provide an explanation why these categories had a legal and constitutional basis in California. Many university staff and several student groups supported these efforts.

The University was never able to answer that challenge. University officials said they were attempting to answer those questions in conversations with Kaiser and Anthem. But no clear answer was ever provided. Instead, in the face of continued faculty and staff efforts to block the policy change, the trustees of Santa Clara publicly backed up the Administration and even went so far as to suggest that they were morally obligated to stop coverage for abortion because women faculty and staff might be using abortion to engage in “gender selection” of their children. This claim outraged many on the campus because it was not only facially absurd and not backed up by any serious research (in fact, quite the opposite, see here and here) but a racial slur aimed at Asian American communities. Unfortunately, this kind of charge has been used more widely of late by many in the anti-abortion movement.

Finally this past week the DMHC agreed unequivocally that the proposal by the University administrations at LMU and SCU had no basis in California law.

The Director of the DMHC, Michelle Rouillard, admitted that earlier approvals of new products that would have ended coverage of legal abortions were wrong. Further, she stated, using new discriminatory categories and limitations like “elective” abortions was inconsistent with both the California Constitution and the Knox-Keene Act. The letter, sent to seven major insurers, can be found here.

There has been widespread media coverage of the effort by SCU and LMU faculty and staff to defend reproductive freedom here, here and here. The ACLU has posted a blog about the DMHC letters here.

I drafted a new foreword for the book but it is otherwise unchanged from the original ms. which Hal and I finished in the late 1980’s in the wake of the defeat of the ERA. There has been some research on the Amendment since and certainly some important developments with respect to the rights of women but the publisher and I thought it important to retain the argument as it was completed then, more or less contemporaneously with the end of that era of the women’s movement. We did, of course, try to get it published then but ran into roadblocks which I describe briefly in the foreword.

The history we examine in detail is very much in the news today as this essay by Louis Menand in a recent New Yorker suggests. Menand gets some important aspects of the story wrong, however. I have sent the magazine a short letter in response and will wait to see if they print it before laying out my comments here.

I posted this originally last August only when the MSM showed no interest in it as an op-ed. I wonder if they share my regrets about the accuracy of my prediction?

Officially, the Obama Administration is firmly behind Syria’s democratic revolution organized to oust the brutal authoritarian Assad regime. If that were indeed the case it could, under certain conditions, represent an important step to assuring a bright future for Syria. There reportedly remains, however, substantial opposition inside the Administration and in Congress to the intervention.

Some of these opponents of U.S. involvement are invoking the problematic policies of the Reagan era when the United States created and armed Nicaragua’s counter-revolutionaries, or contras, to overthrow the Sandinista Government there in the mid-1980s. This is a misleading and cynical maneuver. In fact, Nicaragua offers a very different lesson when it comes to Syria.

There is little doubt that the intervention of the world’s sole superpower into a complex national conflict is fraught with challenges. In the wake of a decade of war, few Americans are enthusiastic about yet another intervention in the Middle East. And there are, naturally, suspicions in the region about the actual goals of U.S. policy. To be successful the strategy that guides the United States in Syria must reflect our democratic values, both to engender domestic U.S. support and to insure a successful transition to post-revolution stability in Syria.

In the wake of the battle of Qusayr, it is clear the rebels face daunting odds. We must recall, though, the rebels did not ask for war. The movement began peacefully, yet another chapter of the rolling social process know as the “Arab Spring.” But the Syrian dictatorship knew that a peaceful “civil rights” style challenge undermined their legitimacy and it began a brutal crackdown that forced the opposition to take up arms. While they have been joined by some dissident military figures, these ordinary Syrians are also now competing for leadership of their revolution with hard-core Islamic fundamentalists, some of them mercenaries from surrounding states, who are well organized and well armed.

That competition is, in fact, reminiscent of the Nicaraguan experience, but not of the contra war of the 1980’s that failed to oust the Sandinistas. Rather, as I show in my recently published book Rights and Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Movement, the situation is analogous to the earlier 1970’s insurrectionary period that led to the ouster of the brutal and authoritarian Somoza regime. In that insurrection, the United States took a largely hands off stance, only distancing itself from Somoza very late. As a result, a democratic mass movement of ordinary Nicaraguans was, as in Syria, pushed into armed conflict by a violent dictator. Then, as may happen in Syria, that same movement turned to the small but well armed and well-organized neo-Stalinist Sandinista Front, or FSLN, the only alternative leadership force available.

When the Somoza regime fell at great human and social cost it was those disciplined FSLN cadre who took the reins of the state. They promised to rule democratically, but then delayed elections and set up new authoritarian institutions, using the credibility that their leading role in the insurrection had won them. It took a brave population, which knew the revolution belonged to them, too, a decade to reemerge and oust the FSLN peacefully and democratically. The armed contra force organized by Somoza era figures backed by the United States actually worked to undermine and delay that peaceful effort. The FSLN was able, skillfully, to use this U.S. proxy war as an excuse to crack down on peaceful domestic opponents. It should be recalled that such regimes are artful at exploiting foreign intervention against their domestic opponents.

In other words, the Syrian situation is most similar to what happened in Nicaragua before the FSLN took power. That period offers a lesson about the risks of not intervening, instead allowing a well-armed and disciplined minority to hijack a democratic revolution. In such a case, the fervent authoritarianism of the Islamic forces works in their favor. After the FSLN took power, on the other hand, there was sufficient democratic space even at the peak of the FSLN’s power for the population to turn against it peacefully. The Nicaraguan contras had only limited support among the population. This is the opposite of the situation in Syria where the opposition clearly has no choice but to defend itself and its movement with arms.

In these circumstances, the principles and conditions that accompany U.S. aid are crucial. Not the principles and conditions that we impose on the Syrians, rather those we impose on ourselves. We got it wrong not once but twice in Nicaragua. The lesson we should have learned is that the way in which we aid those fighting for freedom in other lands is critical to their success. We cannot let the fact of our aid be used propagandistically by either Assad or al Qaeda to undermine the Syrian democrats. That is what we did in Nicaragua and only the FSLN gained as a result.

The support we give should, therefore, be given openly not covertly and the process by which we do it should be transparent. Our engagement with the Syrian people should be open to monitoring on the ground by both Congress and representatives of our civil society, including labor, religious and community groups. It must be clear to all that our aid is aimed only at facilitating the success of a new Syrian democracy not at advancing a narrow self-interest. We must commit to long-term support because the country will require an extensive period to rebuild once peace is established.

The mistake we made in Nicaragua was to leave behind our own long-standing commitments to democracy, sustainable development and human rights. We ended up on the side, first, of a hated dictatorship, and, then, of death squads, as the Nicaraguan contra war spread throughout Central America. In Syria we have a chance to rewrite our past and help Syria write its future.

This post is co-authored by Stephen Diamond and Jennifer Kuan. Jennifer is an economist based at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The post is based in part on an event study we conducted on the impact of Reg. NMS. We will be presenting the paper at the meetings of both ISNIE (Duke) and SASE (Northwestern) this summer.

A firestorm erupted on Wall Street recently sparked by author Michael Lewis’ accusation that the stock markets are “rigged.” Mr. Lewis’ bases his claim on the allegedly manipulative behavior of so-called “high frequency traders,” or HFTs, in today’s financial markets.

Our own study of the changing structure of those markets over several years leads us to conclude Mr. Lewis is correct when he contends many investors trade at a disadvantage to HFTs. We found a significant widening of “spreads,” and therefore costs to investors, following rule changes by the SEC in 2007. Significant structural reform will be needed to restore transparency and fairness to our financial system.

While the issues at stake are complex, the heart of the matter is that HFTs have largely replaced stock exchange “specialists” as intermediaries between buyers and sellers of shares. HFTs trade large volumes of stock, so they claim to provide “liquidity” to the markets. This sounds reassuring to investors who think they can easily buy or sell at reliable and visible prices.

In fact, HFTs are largely free of the obligations and oversight once imposed on specialists by the New York Stock Exchange. HFTs are not mandated to maintain an orderly market like specialists and often disappear at the very moment they are so desperately needed. There is evidence this kind of behavior contributed to events like the “flash crash” of May 2010 as well as the failed IPO of Facebook in 2012.

Exchanges are now eager to profit from HFTs’ vast trading volumes so they help HFTs exploit advantages over other investors, allowing the use of complex and arguably manipulative order types as well as selling them access to data about other investors’ orders. Other enablers of HFTs include the telecommunications firms that allow the HFTs to engage in “fiber arbitrage” to gain privileged high-speed access to data and markets. HFTs use these advantages to move more quickly and flexibly than other investors and thus to trade ahead of ordinary investors at a profit.

The most important enabler, however, is the federal government itself. In 1975 Congress mandated the creation by the SEC of a “national market system.” Congress decided that if the SEC could create computer-based competition with the long dominant New York Stock Exchange’s manual trading floor then costs for the average investor would fall.

The SEC implemented a wave of new rules over the next thirty-five years that did, in fact, reduce trading costs. New electronic markets such as the Nasdaq now compete effectively with the NYSE. Smaller startup companies like Intel, Apple and Microsoft, which did not meet the stringent listing standards of the NYSE, were able to access investor capital on the Nasdaq.

But this was not enough for the SEC. Their goal was an end to the NYSE’s dominance of trading in blue chip firms listed on the NYSE. As the Charlie Sheen character Bud Fox would famously say in the film Wall Street, they were “going after the majors.” One backer of the new approach was Bernie Madoff, who led the automation of the Cincinnati Stock Exchange in the 1980s to draw trading volume away from the NYSE.

The NYSE and the large banks that dominated its board resisted these efforts for many years. But new demand for faster trades from institutional investors provided the political support the SEC needed to push through Regulation National Market System, or Reg. NMS, in 2007.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Until 2007, despite the earlier rule changes by the SEC, the NYSE still handled more than 80% of the trading volume of companies listed there. The NYSE was a monopoly but it stabilized price changes with narrow spreads using a self-regulatory framework crafted over its 200-year history.

Two features were key to that framework. First, because large underwriting firms wielded significant influence at the non-profit member-owned NYSE, they could and did impose stringent standards on firms that wanted to list their shares on the Exchange. Second, to attract investors to trade on the Exchange those same underwriters insured that floor brokers and specialists behaved fairly. The result was good quality information about listing firms as well as orderly pricing facilitated by specialists in both bull and bear markets.

But Reg. NMS uprooted that system. Brokers could now route their clients’ trades to any electronic venue even if it meant that the client did not get a better price available on the NYSE floor. As a result, the volume of NYSE shares traded off the NYSE exploded. The motivation to own the Exchange in order to attract investors with orderly prices was gone and the underwriters quickly sold the Exchange to public investors.

With stock prices no longer kept in check by the NYSE’s longstanding rules, our study found that spreads widened, volatility increased and the cost to the average investor went up. Congress had a useful idea in 1975 when it helped create a market for risky technology start-ups and other small firms. They need to step in again to deal with the unintended consequences of that important innovation.